CASE # 12: Daniel Was an Extremely Calculating Individual

Some of us remember the "good old days" when we banged out design calculations on a high-end TI or HP scientific calculator. And how we even wrote code to automate the calculations we repeated often! Thinking how cool it would be to do that again on a calculator he built himself, Daniel decided to emulate a subset of the TI-59. His project contains two displays and a serial port, supports the TI Algebraic Operating System and even some programmability. It also includes free source code to get you started. If you are up to it, write more code to add functions and share it with the Gadget Freak community. Click here for the parts list and instructions.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

Kaspersky Labs indicated at its February meeting that cyber attacks are far more sophisticated than previous thought. It turns out even air-gapping (disconnecting computers from the Internet to protect against cyber intrusion) isn’t a foolproof way to avoid getting hacked. And Kaspersky implied the NSA is the smartest attacker.

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